Women have a lot to learn about how to treat the festive season, admits Jenny
McCartney.

It has been estimated that the average woman spends 300 hours preparing for Christmas, much of which is spent choosing presents. Of course, some of us still persist in cramming the necessary 300 hours into, say, 15. This usually results in something I call “Christmas head”, in which one’s brain begins to feel increasingly like a ham bouncing around inside a pressure-cooker, and one would willingly fling any amount of cash at a sales assistant just to be permitted to leave the department store.

Men famously complete their gift shopping – and all other festive chores – on Christmas Eve, usually during their lunch break. Women are fond of saying that without the female effort, Christmas “wouldn’t happen”, since we are the chief devotees of the increasingly frenzied cult of Yuletide, working ourselves into a lather over napkins and table decorations. Yet without our obsessive attention to minutiae, Christmas would indeed happen, just not in the same style.

If men ran Christmas, there would probably be a roast dinner of some description, perhaps with a few elements missing, and a handful of amusingly haphazard presents. There might even be a little more time to reflect upon our blessings. Perhaps this is one very rare instance when we might profitably echo the sentiment of Professor Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady: “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?”